A Plague Tale: Requiem is a follow-up to Asobo Studio’s A Plague Tale: Innocence. It sees Amicia and Hugo ventureing to new locations to find a cure for the latter’s curse. Along with more involved stealth and combat mechanics, it also features gorgeous visuals and an incredible soundtrack. Check out our review here.

Nobody Saves the World is a top-down action RPG from Drinkbox Studios of Guacamelee fame. Players must battle the Calamity as Nobody, using transformation to assume different Forms. Each Form has a unique playstyle and passive skills, which you can mix and match as you progress. As for Evil West, it’s an action-adventure title set in the weird Wild West as you battle vampires with guns and a gauntlet.

Divinity: Original Sin, one of the best games of last year, and the best RPG of last year, will be coming to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this month as Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition. To incentivize console owners to pick this game up, a whole host of pre-order bonuses have been revealed.

Pre-order the game to receive the Last Trick Bag, offering a bunch of new cosmetic items, and the White Dragon wand. The full list of Last Trick Bag bonuses includes the below.  And don’t be too worried, all of this content will also be available for you to purchase separately after the game launches, if you don’t pre-order the game (or if your retailer is not participating in this promotion).

In addition to this, platform specific DLC will be made available to players after the game has launched as well.

• Grumio’s Backpack
• Pamphlet of recipes
• 3 x Grumio’s Cotton Candy Dye
• 2 x Grenades ingredients
• 1 x Inert Wand

With these ingredients, you can create:

 Scales of Steel grenade – White Dragon wand (with an Ice Wall skill)

PS4 Secret Trick Bag:

• Grumio’s Backpack
• Pamphlet of recipes
• 3 x Grumio’s Favourite Triad Dye
• 2 x Grenades ingredients
• 1 x Inert Wand

With these ingredients, you can create:

• Eye of the Patriarch grenade
• Blue Dragon wand (with an Invisibility skill)

Xbox One Forgotten Trick Bag:

• Grumio’s Backpack
• Pamphlet of recipes
• 3 x Grumio’s Petrol Brand Dye
• 2 x Grenades ingredients
• 1 x Inert Wand

With these ingredients, you can create:

• Breaching Fire grenade Silver Dragon wand (with a Teleportation skill)

So, yeah, that’s enough incentive for you to go and get the game already!

The beta for Blood Bowl 2 is now live; players who pre-ordered the game on Steam can now play the beta starting today. The beta includes both multiplayer and one-off matches against AI bots. The races currently available include Humans, Orcs, Skaven, and Dwarfs, and the final game will have even more races, including the Bretonnians (which you can see in the trailer below), and the Wood Elves and Lizardmen, which you get for pre-ordering the game.

Unlike a lot of the other betas these days, all your progress and data from the beta will carry over into the final game, so you can invest yourself fully into it, without worrying about it all having been for nothing. Personally, that would get me invested in playing the beta.

There is also a brand new trailer, which you can see for yourself below.

Along with the ground and air combat from the previous games, Red Dragon will see naval combat added to the mix. The warships aren’t just meant to be additional units, as a new layer of strategy can be exploited by commanders who are wily enough. The setting has also shifted to Asia and there are over 650 new units for 1450 units in total. The battlefields have been significantly layered to allow for more strategic options and a dynamic campaign has been added. You’ll be able to play with up to 20 players at the same time.

If you played AirLand Battle and pre-order Wargame Red Dragon, you’ll receive a 25 percent discount, even with one day left for the game to launch.

After having made an impressive debut at E3 last month, Crimes and Punishments: Sherlock Holmes gets a new video that showcases the upcoming game based on the world’s most famous sleuth. The new trailer showcases the new graphics of the game, now being powered by Unreal Engine 3, along with new investigation techniques that Holmes can now use. The total number of new techniques available to the player is claimed to be fourteen.

In addition to this, the new gameplay video also showcases the new mystery, along with the new suspects, and the scene of the crime. It just does a generally good job of setting the new mystery of the game up.

Crimes and Punishments: Sherlock Holmes is the newest title Focus Interactives’ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series. The previous title in the franchise, The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, received incredible praise, with GamingBolt itself calling it one of the finest Sherlock Holmes stories of all time.

The new title goes on sale later this year on Microsoft Windows PCs, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3.

The problem is, appearances can be very deceiving. Mars: War Logs is not a great RPG. It’s not even a good RPG. It is, in every sense of the word, thoroughly mediocre. However, what it does have is ambition, lots of it, and a whole lot of potential too. Playing Mars: War Logs is an exercise in heartbreak, as you see so many great ideas, and just wish that the developer had had a bigger budget to be able to fully realize its vision.

Take, for example, the story of the game. Whereas the immediate narrative of the game is quite the collection of cliches, rife with prisoners of war, shady characters with ambiguous motives, and a giant organization you thought was good, but turns out to be evil, the actual lore of the game is brilliant. I would not mind reading a science fiction book set within this game’s universe, presuming it was well written, because the lore is just so imaginative and well thought out.

The game takes place on the surface of a war ravaged Mars. Some time in the past, there was a great, cataclysmic event referred to only as The Turmoil, which resulted in Mars being cut off from Earth. The planet’s population, now abandoned, lives in a state of perpetual warfare (or the potential of it), given the alarmingly dwindling scarce water resources of the planet, controller by four guilds. The guilds are at war with each other a lot (including during the game, when Aurora, the guild the main character comes from, is at war with Abundance, the oldest water guild on the planet).

It’s an interesting setting, and an interesting idea. Nothing here is new, of course, per se, but this specific amalgamation of ideas is certainly something that hasn’t been seen before. It also opens up a world of exciting possibilities for storytelling, with a lot of political intrigue and exposition to boot. The sad part, then, is, that the game itself never actually delivers on the promise of its initial ideas. What we are left with is a rather run of the mill story of trying to take down an organization once thought benevolent, but revealed to be evil.

It’s not like the characters themselves are any better either. Roy, the main character, feels like a derivative of Marcus Fenix, a prisoner of war with a mysterious past, while Innocence, his NPC companion and the narrator of the titular War Logs (referred to in game as War Diaries), lives up this name, and again, recalls Japanese character archetypes.

Bafflingly enough, these JRPG stereotypes are completely at odds with a game that is trying to be as ‘western’ as possible, in everything from its dialog, its insistence on explosions, a story that is trying to shock the player using twists that are supposed to make the player think, and the battle system itself.

The battle system… the combat at the heart of this game is brilliant, another of those sparks of genuine greatness in this game. The battles are heavily reliant on melee, which is just as well, because it feels great, and every attack feels like it has the sufficient amount of heft and weight behind it. This great melee, and the game’s inclusion of some staple RPG conventions like a Tactics menu, and of course, a set of Dungeons and Dragons inspired Feats, leads to battles feeling pretty good.

They’re promoted from being ‘pretty good’ to ‘a whole lot of fun’ because of Technomancy. Technomancy is this game’s stand in for magic. Roy, the main character, was once a Technomancer, and a whole lot of your enemies are Technomancers too. They can use a full range of Star Wars like electric attacks, that bring on the pain, and they can even put on melee blocking shields, that require a  change of tactics. The enemies are also pretty brutal and ruthless, incessantly making your life difficult, and making you roll your way around, trying to dodge attacks and land in a blow. You get access to Technomancy yourself, although it is not available to you from the get go.

As hectic as things can get in battles, and as harsh as the enemy AI can be, it’s pretty good then that you don’t have to look after your NPC companions. They don’t die in battle, they are just knocked out and return fully recovered once the battle has ended. This means that that’s one thing less you need to worry about, and you can just focus on the battles without worrying about the companion AI dragging you down.

Combat genuinely feels visceral and fun, and it gets better, as you craft increasingly better (and more and more improbably makeshift) weapons, by bolting on parts on top of your base weapons. The combat has heft to it, it has genuine weight, and it just feels great.

It’s just as well then, that most of the game is combat. A large part of the time will be spent just battling enemies, although if you ever do get tired, stealth is a (not altogether viable) alternative.

There’s a genuine spark of greatness in Mars: War Logs, but the game as a whole is let down by its poor story and characterization, by its confusing morality system that is altogether ineffective, and on the whole, by a budget that clearly wasn’t enough to do the game’s vision justice. Whereas casual players should probably stay away from this one, RPG veterans should check the game out and give it a spin, if only to see the genuinely brilliant ideas at the game’s core. Mars: War Logs isn’t exactly a good game, but I have hopes that the next one, if there is a next one, given more time and a bigger budget, will be able to realize all the potential and promise oat the heart of this game.

This game was reviewed on PC.

Ooookay.

Anyway, clubbed into the “cyberpunk” genre, it’s due to release for Xbox LIVE, PlayStation Network and PC in Spring 2013, Spiders promises a wide variety of quests, tactical dynamic combat, extensive character specialization through different skill trees and a complete craft system.

The game looks good overall, though we’d be interested to see just how the combat plays out, and figure out just what the hell is going on. Stay tuned for more details going forward, and in the meantime, check out the first trailer below.

There’s now a new fifth operation to the existing four. This new campaign is called – surprise, surprise – Fatal Error and last for 5 missions in a story separate from the main game.

The story is, “based on an original alternate history” and set “in 1979, a time when hopes for a peaceful settlement of the East/West tensions seemed close, until the Euromissiles crisis and the discovery of a Soviet combat brigade being deployed in Cuba. Within the depths of Mount Cheyenne, home to North America’s most vital command center, a tragic mistake made by a mere maintenance technician will set the world on fire once again.” Sounds groovy.

Fatal Error will also feature support of touch-based gameplay for those with touch¹ displays. It is currently avaialable on Steam for PC owners.

Mars: War Logs is something that not many people know of, but this teaser released by Focus Interactive should do the job. The game will be released on the PS3, Xbox 360 and the PC.

The game developed by Spiders for Xbox Live (not literally), offers a wide variety of quests, tactical dynamic combat, and extensive character specialization through different skill trees and a complete craft system.

The game runs on The Silk Engine, which is, again, developed by Spiders, and makes the look of Mars authentic. Watch the video if you don’t believe us and compare it with the pictures from NASA’s Curiosity.

Mars: War Logs takes you to the red planet over a century after the catastrophe that threw the planet and its colonists into chaos. Water has become the most precious resource on the arid planet with a few companies fighting a perpetual war for its control.

The game will be released next year.

Focus Interactive has released two new titles on PC today via Steam, titled RAW and the arcade game Rotastic. At their very launch, Focus is offering a 25% off discount on the games’ purchase via Steam for “a limited time.”

This is also kicking off the Focus weekend on Steam, during which games under the publisher’s label will be sold for discounts as high as 75% off. Many games will be included, and some of them will be: Wargame European Escalation, the new reference in strategy games, Game of Thrones, Cities XL, Sherlock Holmes, Blood Bowl, Divinity II.

A Focus Super Pack is also being sold, which includes 7 of the main Focus games in one package for a “reasonable price.”

Some of those games mentioned above aren’t half bad, and a few like Game of Thrones might be worth a try, especially if you get such a good offer on them.

Stay tuned to GB for more info.